Bing Teams Up With Wolfram Alpha

Bing is already growing at a fair clip, but whether or not it maintain its upward trend in market share at a reliable rate has yet to be seen. To that end, Bing has managed to get its foot in the door with Wolfram Alpha, allowing Microsoft’s search engine to roll out some results from the interesting but under popularised search.

Wolfram Alpha, if you’ve not encountered it before, is a search engine that, rather than simply allowing you to throw in queries and check the responses, allows users to throw in questions and get back some pretty fine results. The problem is that Wolfram’s search tends to take issue with the way in which questions are posed more often than their content, making it a little fickle. This has been a significant reason for many not to use Wolfram Alpha. However, if users could simply search with their search engine of choice and receive results from Wolfram, it could be a far more equitable arrangement.

The only question now is whether or not he ability to answer maths and science questions quickly will be enough to persuade people away from Google and into the Bing fold. The fact is, Google has been doing relatively simple maths for a long time, but Wolfram Alpha seems to be capable of that bit more. Moreover, if the choice is between Google and Bing/Wolfram, it’s likely that anyone with any interest in Wolfram Alpha will be changing over to Bing… and those users weren’t just not searching before, they’re likely to be more google users.

For now though, we imagine the inclusion of some Wolfram Alpha results in Bing won’t make waves. However, once Wolfram has some of its issues with understanding the manner in which people ask it questions, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it become one of Bing’s big draws.

You can read more about the Wolfram Alpha/Bing teamup over at CNET, here.